SONICpicnic – Iris Garrelfs

Not long to go until our final event of 2015, SONICpicnic at VIVID Projects on Saturday 28th November. The event starts at 4pm and runs into the evening, with food provided by The Real Junk Food Project Birmingham on a pay-as-you-feel basis. Advance tickets are still available here. For now, we’d like to introduce you to another of our artists – Iris Garrelfs.

Iris is a sound artist working on the cusp of music, art and sociology, whose practice includes fixed media, installation and improvised performance. She is the commissioning editor of the online journal Reflections on Process in Sound and the co-curator and director of Sprawl, a London based experimental music organisation. Iris has a PhD in Sound Art from University of the Arts London where she also active as a researcher and lecturer, and her artworks and performances have featured worldwide.

In performance Iris often uses her voice as raw material for conjuring multilayered listening experiences via MaxMSP. Improvised voice is transmuted into machine noises, intricate rhythms, choral works, pulverised “into granules of electroacoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing” as the Wire Magazine put it. In the words of ATTN:Magazine, her “gymnastic flexibility is remarkable. Her falsetto has this incredible pinball elasticity, zipping suddenly upward in playful excitement or sudden shock, reaching pitches that seem to shrink her into miniature.” She also often uses spontaneous scores and elements of space to mould complex aural collages, which have been compared to artists such as Yoko Ono, Henri Chopin, Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk and Arvo Part.